The Future of Ruby Dragon

See below for details about upcoming releases of Ruby Dragon. If you have feedback or want to make a suggestion, please submit an issue on the project’s Github page.

Unallocated to a release

• [ADD] Complete Example Set A full suite of example scripts is needed for users to quickly understand how to use the functionality here, and what is possible. The set of examples will be considered adequate when there is at least a 1-1 parity with the existing Python examples.
• [ADD] Colorization Support in Interactive Terminal
• [ADD] Tab-completion Support in all languages
• [ADD] Better terminal than Ghidra default It would be nice to support features like colorization, and even nicer to simply use one that someone else has already built instead of implementing this ourselves.

What you’ll find here and what you wont

Ruby Dragon is under active development, and has a long list of new features and improvements waiting to be implemented. Some of these are detailed in the issues list on the project Github website, but this is certainly not a comprehensive list of planned updates. Similarly, work that is in progress on new features is tracked as a project on the Github repository, but future planned work does not exist there either. Instead, the plans for future direction are kept here, in the project roadmap.

Items are added to the roadmap once they have been identified, assessed for level of effort, and prioritized based on community needs. Each item is assigned to a semantic version, along with its change type, a description, and the reasoning behind it. Where they exist, you will see references to issues on the Github repository where you can go for more details on the origin of the request. Once a version is in work, you will be able to find a corresponding project on the Github repository with each roadmap item listed as a task. Once all tasks are complete, the version will be released and the next started.

Once an item has been implemented it will be removed from the roadmap. If you would like to see a history of changes on the existing codebase, check out the Changelog (CHANGELOG.md in the project root) to see what was included in each version of the library. In most cases, roadmap items will be removed from this document and placed there upon completion.

Note that the timelines associated with each change are vague at best. The project team is not currently big enough to realistically make any promises, so timing is often left out to prevent folks from feeling cheated if something takes longer than expected.

A Note about Github issues and projects

A fair question to ask is why the roadmap is not being managed within the issue and project features of Github itself, since this is where the project is currently hosted. Indeed, suggestions submitted by the community are tracked as issues, and projects are already created for ongoing work. There are a few reasons that a separate roadmap is maintained:

• Issues are used to exclusively track bugs and community requests. This certainly isn’t a hard and fast rule, and isn’t followed by many other projects, but it is how Ruby Dragon is managed. Keeping the issue count as a clear indicator of known problems and community requests lets the project maintainers (and anyone interested in looking at how well it is being maintained) immediately see how much outstanding work exists. Of course, the roadmap may have features requested by the community or enhancements made clear by bug reports, but it will also have a number of features and tweaks that have a lower priority.
• Project direction should come packaged with the product. Again this isn’t a commonly followed rule, but it is one that the project author follows. Anyone that obtains the source code of the project at a single point in time should be able to quickly see the current direction of the project. Maintaining the roadmap within the version control of the source itself facilitates this, the same way that licensing and copyright notifications are traditionally bundled with code. And if you don’t care, you can always ignore them.